SpaceX Dragon Spacecraft for NASA | End of One Era
SpaceX Dragon Spacecraft for NASA, The Last of Its Kind, Returns to Earth from ISS
The date August 18, 2006, forever altered the trajectory of SpaceX.
On that day, NASA awarded SpaceX a contract to develop a service for delivering cargo to the International Space Station.
The first-generation version of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft debuted in 2010 with a test flight in low Earth orbit. The Dragon capsule accomplished its first trip to the International Space Station in May 2012 on a second demonstration mission under NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services, or COTS, program.
Through the COTS program, NASA contributed $396 million toward the development of the Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 launcher in a public-private partnership with SpaceX.
At the time, SpaceX was just 4 years old. The company had attempted a single launch, of its Falcon 1 rocket, from an atoll in the Pacific Ocean a few months earlier. This small rocket, capable of putting a few hundred kilograms into orbit, had flown for about half a minute before falling back to Earth and crashing into a reef just offshore. The rocket failed because, even before it cleared the launch pad, a fuel leak caused the engine to catch fire.
This was hardly a sterling record for a spaceflight company. So at the time, NASA was making a big bet on an SpaceX.
According to Gwynne Shotwell, who is President and Chief Operating Officer of SpaceX — what this original NASA contract meant to the company in 2006.
“Oh, that was really important money,” she said. “We were a little company. We were jackasses at that time. We’d just had a failure on the pad. We blew up a rocket in March of that year. Yeah, it was super critical. From my perspective, NASA was acknowledging that, even though we had a failure on Falcon 1, they felt like we had the right attitude and the right technology to extend this to a much larger rocket, the Falcon 9, and a capsule.”
Over the next half-decade, SpaceX would design, develop, and test its Cargo Dragon spacecraft. As usual, the company looked to cut costs and upend the traditional aerospace model.
In this video Engineering today will discuss SpaceX Dragon capsule which returned to Earth, wrapping up a successful trip to International Space Station that heralded the end of one era and the start of another for its SpaceX builders.
Let’s get into the details.
#EngineeringToday #SpaceX #SpaceXDragon
Inspired by
https://arstechnica.com/
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/
https://www.space.com/
https://spacenews.com/
AUDIO:
Voiceover by Scott Leffler — scottleffler.com
atoll logiciel
